Finding a suitable tow vehicle for the tiny house has proven to be just as difficult as locating a suitable location to store it. Most rental trucks do not support heavy-duty towing.  The ones that do are very expensive to rent and must be picked up/dropped off far from our home. Professional towing companies are not that interested in a 1.7-mile haul. Turning to Craig’s List was the answer.  Within hours of my posting, I had four suitable truck owners willing to tow the house for a modest fee. The only thing needed for this plan to work was a drawbar and ball hitch of suitable capacity to connect the truck to the trailer.  Pictured are the assembled components, rated to match the 14,000 pound trailer. As it stands, I estimate the weight of the house to be less than 10,000 pounds.

I spent a good portion of the weekend culling some 3000 photos from my collection of 100,000.  I covered two years, deleting weak photos, making edits to improve “keepers”, and adding ratings/keywords to make future searching more efficient. It is only when I make such comprehensive reviews that I realize how few good photos I have of myself.  Fortunately, there are some, and of them I liked this one the most. 

Moving the tiny house has proved to be a complicated affair. Our first storage destination proved to be too uneven to safely park the trailer.  Our attempt to move there was delayed by a massive snowstorm which in retrospect was a blessing in so much as it forced us to look for a more appropriate location.  Jeanine saved the day by connecting Maya and I with Steve Verrill who has generously offered to let us store the tiny house on his property.  Maya and I carefully covered the 1.7 mile route to his farm measuring each power line and low tree limb to ensure that our 13′-6″ tall house would not get snagged on anything.  Several passing motorists were not sure what to make of me standing in the middle of the road with my tape measure.

While he was back for the holidays, we agreed to help Nico with the purchase of a weighted keyboard/synthesizer so that he could practice while at school and perform with his friends.  Within days of returning to Colorado, he located a lightly used high-end Roland on Craig’s List.  Of our three children, Nico has taken the keenest interest in music and it is a pursuit we are delighted to support.

Superpedestrian’s CEO leading an industrial design discussion in the middle of a hallway. To say we have a casual work environment would be an understatement.  I spent several hours yesterday working on something of a mechanical puzzle related to our next-generation product.  None of those ideas were as good as the one I had while driving to work this morning.  By noon I fashioned a working prototype constructed from foam core insulation (easily cut and shaped with a knife).  There is almost nothing I enjoy more than coming up with a clever solution to a challenging problem and then reducing it to practice.  It was a very good day.

Snow today during commuting hours had me working from home. We only received about 3 inches of the 5 inches forecasted but that was just fine by me. Normally I wait for the snow to stop before clearing it but needed to make sure Maya could get out for a job interview, doctor’s appointment, and trip to New York City to visit her friend Sarinnagh. The house was empty for most of the day and the lack of distractions helped me to focus on a tricky mechanical challenge that my team is working on. This evening I sold Nico’s drum kit which has been sitting idle since he left for college. Little by little we are clearing out all items which will not be joining us when we move to a smaller house at some point in the future. Not for sale is the framed cymbal and drum sticks, signed by Alex Van Halen with a dedication to Nico, a gift when he received the Shane’s Inspiration Award in 2008.

Maya was in a baking mood this evening and I popped into the kitchen several times to monitor her progress. If I had to guess, I would say that Caleb is going to be the beneficiary of her little project.

Most mornings I leave Concord very early to avoid traffic. When I arrive in Cambridge, my first priority is breakfast which involves a one-mile roundtrip walk into Central Square. I have already photographed most things along the route of photographic interest.  This morning I encountered a small addition to the normal scenery that was “barely” visible.

We had planned to move the tiny house to a new winter home last week but the snow made that impractical. With most of it melted, Maya and I readied the tiny house for towing and completed a number of small interior projects (installed door and window trim, and the shower head and toilet valve and some caulking and varnishing).  The house is tight as a drum and quite toasty with the heat turned on.  Neither Maya or I will have time to work on it again until the summer at the earliest and our HOA rules preclude us from keeping it on our property.

Twenty-four hours of rain and balmy temperatures made quick work of the foot of snow covering our backyard and the rest of Massachusetts.  Oddly, we still have a two-foot-high snow drift on the shaded portion of our back porch.

I recently started working with a new image processing program that has a rather nice HDR (high dynamic range) merge function.  The idea is that you take multiple exposures of a scene while mounted on a tripod, underexposing one, overexposing another, and properly exposing the last. The software then combines the shadows from the overexposed image with the highlights from the underexposed image with the mid-tones of the properly exposed image to create a single high dynamic range picture.  I decided to reprocess some images I shot back in 2009 and was very pleased with the results.

Occasionally I spend a little time perfecting my product photography technique. This evening I practiced lighting an object on a white background with minimal shadows. Not as easy as you might think.
 

Constructed in 1902 for a cost of $40,000 the Kensington, located a few blocks from my office, is now a condominium with 49 units. A three bedroom, 1,500 sqft. condo is listed at $1.3M and has a $550 monthly homeowners association fee.  In 2015 the same unit sold for half the price.  To say that the Boston real estate market is hyper-inflated would be a huge understatement.  The situation is only going to get worse if Amazon selects Boston for its HQ2.  At $250K, a helicopter is starting to sound like a good alternative to solve my commuting woes.

The snow banks in Cambridge are several feet high.  When most of the land is used for houses, roads, or sidewalks there remains very little space to pile up snow cleared from the latter two. Below is the mountain of snow that was cleared from our parking area at work.